Every day, SEOs are challenged in their jobs to solve problems big and small - some are technically complex, others are merely time consuming, repetitive and tedious. At SEOmoz, we love to build, use and recommend tools to help solve these issues. Tools and automation aren't always the right answer, but for many of the challenges we face, they're a welcome ally in the battle for effectiveness and efficiency.

In this first of the two part series on the subject, I'll be covering tools on SEOmoz. My next segment will focus on tools across the web.

#1: View Source Sucks

We've all had the experience of loading a web page, viewing the source code and sorting through trying to determine whether the H1 tag was implemented properly or if the <head> contains a rel="canonical" tag or, worst of all, counting internal/external links manually. These are essential elements of the SEO process, but they're a "Royal Pain In The Butt" (RPITB from here on out).

Solution: Analyze Page in the mozBar

Thankfully, the mozBar has this spiffy "Analyze Page" button that opens a visual overlay with critical stats like meta data, link counts, rel="canonical," Hx tags, and even counts of characters in content areas. I've used this personally in a lot of live-review and client meeting scenarios and people are consistently impressed (and it makes us look like Pros).

Link counts and page attributes are visible at the bottom of the "analyze page" overlay

Getting the data fast is awesome - looking professional and raising eyebrows while we do it is another thing. I love tools that make SEOs look good - honestly, I'm focused on making more of SEOmoz's products in this vein. I wish we'd built more of our tools historically with the mindset of ease-of-use and simple, obvious value (I sometimes worry that we've gone overly advanced in past tools that I've designed - hopefully Adam & the product team will keep us better focused).

#2: Determining a PageRank Penalty

Sometimes it's hard to know whether a drop in PageRank (or the PageRank score on a page you haven't visited before) is due to natural factors or modifcation by Google's webspam team. Whether it's a review of a potential client's website, a look at a potential link partner or an analysis of your own site, knowing what's happened with the PageRank score is an advanced, but sometimes essential piece of the SEO process.

Solution: Historical PageRank + PageRank vs. mozRank

Thankfully, there's a very good system for solving this problem (or at least getting closer to the answer). First up is a free tool we've had for a long time - the Historical PageRank Checker:

When PageRank has been lowered more than one point, particularly in a timeframe that doesn't correlate with a standard PR update, you can feel relatively confident that some sort of PR penalty was incurred.

Next are the metrics mozRank & mozTrust from Linkscape. Since mozRank in particular is both highly correlated with PageRank (on average ~0.55 off from toolbar PR) and calculated independently, you can use the comparison between these metrics to help identify disparities. When PR is significantly lower than mozRank, particularly on the homepage of a website, there's a potential that a PR penalty may exist (though it's also possible that PR simply hasn't updated - Linkscape recalculates metrics every month, while Google updates PageRank on a fairly random schedule every 3-9 months).

The metrics from Linkscape aren't perfect, nor are they a sure identifier, but they do provide an alternate source for comparison and contrast. You can get mozRank via Linkscape itself, or use the free API if you'd like to employ it on tools or in a more scalable fashion.

#3: Valuing a Potential Link

It's hard to compare the value of links from potential pages, and yet this is an essential task in the SEO world. Managers need to know whether link acquisition is going well or poorly. Link builders need to be able to judge the quality of the sites and pages they're targeting. SEO consultants and analysts need to determine where good links are coming from, where competitors have earned great links and what links might be spammy/low quality.

Historically, we've had a very limited number of metrics - things like link counts from Yahoo! Site Explorer, PageRank of the site's homepage and others have low correlation with rankings (we explored this on the blog in Ben's Ranking Models post) and data accuracy issues, too (PageRank's update cycles and lack of granularity - one point of PageRank is a huge amount of variance).

Solution: Linkscape Metrics

Linkscape has a lot of depth when it comes to metrics (sometimes too much, actually!). You can see data about numbers of links, linking root domains, scores around raw link popularity (mozRank) and trustworthiness (mozTrust). The metrics run on both a domain and an individual page, so you can get a sense of the importance of an individual URL and the domain it's on. You can also feel confident that the metrics are provided with a greater eye to providing specific value to SEOs. The folks behind Linkscape are uniquely focused on providing metrics that prove valuable, predictive and accurate.

One of my favorite places to get the metrics quickly is via the mozBar, which shows them at the top of the analyze page overlay. For even more depth, you can use the data detail tab (e.g. for Raveable.com) on the Linkscape basic report - and for large amounts of data, you can view (or export to CSV) the top 3,000 links to a page or site via the advanced reports.

#4: Watching Rankings Over Time

Watching rankings is a pain and manual systems aren't scalable or a good use of anyone's time. It's also tough (perhaps even a RPITB) to track rankings across multiple engines and TLDs (.co.uk, .com.au, .co.nz, etc.) and keep track of the data in a format that can be exported intelligently.

Solution: Rank Tracker

Thankfully, there's the Rank Tracker, a serious upgrade from our previous Rank Checker tool. You can watch rankings across multiple engines and geographies, and the interface is simple + easy to use.

Choosing terms to track is straightforward, and the system automatically pings every week and stores the historical data, which you can download in CSV. Lately, I've been impressed with accuracy - despite the personalization and geographic modification, the team's been making great strides to ensure that the rankings are a good estimate of what a "normal" (non-logged in, geographically agnostic) user would receive.

BTW - I've also heard good things about Advanced Web Ranking (and always like to recommend good competitors - definitely more of that coming in the next post in this series).

#5: Quickly Comparing Two Pages Metrics

Answering the question "why does that page outrank me?" has plagued SEOs since time immemorial. There's so many things that goes into the ranking equation that it can be tough to determine what's critical to the process vs. unimportant. It's particularly challenging to understand the difference in link metrics - is one on a more important domain? Does one have more links, but they're mostly nofollowed?

Solution: Visualization & Comparison Tool

The visual shapes represent the degree to which the page is meeting that metric's potential, and somewhat amazingly, we see that the bigger area nearly always outranks the smaller one. It's a great way to show clients, prospects and managers the gap between your site and a competitor's and explain how far you have to go and in what direction. The tool doesn't show all of the metrics in Linkscape, but it's a good representative set and in future iterations, we plan to have more refinement and options available.

#6: Finding Competitors' Links

Who's linking to my competitors but not linking to me? It seems like a simple, straightforward question, but, as usual, the devil's in the details. Most of the existing toolsets on the web (I mentioned several in this post) use the Yahoo! link query - linkdomain:site1.com linkdomain:site2.com -linkdomain:mysite.com (for example, see this search for pages linking to hotels.com and kayak.com but not Oyster.com). The problem is you have no good way to determine whether the list returned includes nofollow links, whether you're getting the most valuable, important pages/sites listed first and whether the list filters out some potentially great stuff.

Solution: Competitive Link Research Tool

The tool results will show you a list of domains that contain links to pages from your competitors but don't point to you:

At SEOmoz, we've been calling this "cheating" for link building. The results are so useful and instantly actionable (and the data's quite excellent, particularly when sorted in DmR order) that it just doesn't make sense not to use it.

#7: Tracking Links & Mentions in the "Fresh Web'

Watching what's happening around a blog post, website or brand name is a challenge. Lots of blog search engines and some of the emerging real time search engines can give you data points here, and some are actually quite good for their niche (I'll definitely cover a few in Part 2), but sometimes, you just want a graph of what's been happening in the blogosphere/twitosphere with a list of URLs where the action's taking place.

Solution: Blogscape

We don't talk a tremendous amount about Blogscape, but it's getting to be a very good tool (and more upgrades are on the way). The dataset currently comprises 10 million feed sources that we found significant links to via Linkscape. These includes news feeds, blogs and, yes, Twitter accounts, too. The threshold was a number of unique linking root domains, so while this source doesn't contain everything, it's also not bogged down by a ton of noise, helping to make the signal rise to the top.

Don't miss the query operators page, which shows extent of search parameters and advanced data you can get from the index.

#8: Fast Access to Links & Anchor Text

Sometimes, you just need to see a list of links fast. Yahoo! Site Explorer has historically been the "go-to" source for this, but over time, not being able to filter nofollow'd links, nor see metrics, nor have any idea about the sort order used has made it a frustratingtool.

Solution: Backlink Analysis Tool

Labs' Backlink Analysis Tool is terrificly useful for this scenario. Not only do you get a list of links ordered by relative importance in just a few seconds (slightly longer if the URL/domain has many thousands of links), you also retrieve an ordered list of anchor text distribution pointing to the page, subdomain or root domain.

It's not pretty, but it is simple to use.

The fast anchor text breakdown is terrific for making short work of comparing multiple sites' link profiles.

The link list itself is ordered by mozRank passed, a metric helping to show where the most "juice" is originating (though not necessarily the most important domains/pages). You can get more advanced in full Linkscape reports, but quick, dirty link lists and anchor text at the touch of a button, this is hard to beat.

#9: Quickly Comparing Metrics from Numerous Sources

There are times when client reports or c-level execs need a long list of metrics from a variety of sources - Compete, Alexa, Google PageRank, Yahoo! Link Counts, Google News mentions, etc. Going to each of the individual tools, running reports and gathering the metrics can be an especially tedious RPITB, particularly if you need to gather this data for multiple domains/pages.

Solution: Trifecta Tool

Trifecta isn't always perfect - it's pulling data from a lot of sources, some of which don't have great uptime and can be squirrely about the ways they return information. However, it can be a much needed ally in the fight against the laborious process of manually collecting the numbers.

The comparison feature is also a neat way to see and collect data from multiple sources at once:

#10: Finding Competitors' Most Successful Linkbait

How is it that my competitor earned all their links? What content did they put out there that was so successful? How can I figure out their strategy? Unless you're willing to do a lot of surfing, this is a tough problem to solve.

Solution: Top Pages Tool

Thankfully, through Linkscape, we can collect data about which pages on a given subdomain or root domain have earned the most links. To give greater accuracy in the data, we use # of linking root domains. It's our sense that seeing pages that have earned large numbers of links from different sites will give the best idea of where and how links are flowing to a site and how they've been acquired. The Top Pages Tool in Labs shows this data:

Now that you can see them, you can go visit those pages, learn how they got the links, and reverse engineer those crafty strategic moves (also great for ID'ing spam that's been created on your site).

#11: Identifying Pages that Can Flow Link Juice Internally

How do I know which pages on my site have the most link juice to share? It's a common query as the right internal links can help to make the difference with both competitive SERPs and indexing problems.

Solution: Top Pages Tool

Once again, it's Top Pages to the rescue. Not only can we see which pages have earned link juice, but we can also identify potential problems (302s and blocking w/ robots.txt being two of the big ones):

I'm guessing someone at Netflix should really look into this... FYI - the "0" usually doesn't indicate a problem; it's just a marker (we'll work on fixing that up as I know some of you have asked about it).

#12: Get Social Media Monitoring Data

While Blogscape is a good search tool on our fresh web index, there's a lot of demand for a more functional montoring tool. Robust solutions from companies like Visible Technologies here in Seattle are quite pricey (worthwhile if you're a big brand making a serious investment, but no geared to SMBs or most consultants).

Solution: Social Media Monitoring Prototype

The counts (links, mentions and tweets) can be used to help determine the value of blogosphere, Twitter and linkbait campaigns over time. Just be aware that because of how Blogscape's index and retrieval of sources functions, data from the last 48 hours is less stable and complete than older material. It's a good tool to use after the fact, not necessarily in the heat of the campaign.

#13: Streamline Common Link Search Queries

If you've ever been tasked with manual link acquisition and told to use "all the common link queries" to find potential sources, you know how incredibly frustrating the process can be. No one likes searching for the same combination of phrases dozens of times over and over to retrieve the one or two credible sources that result in the SERPs.

Solution: Labs' Link Acquisition Assistant

Danny released a spiffy tool earlier this year - the Link Acquisition Assistant - that's a big time-saver on this front. Enter a few pieces of data about your site and the link campaign you're running and it will spit back links to tons of relevant search queries and link lists. While it doesn't automate everything, it can also be a huge boost in exposing ways to find and earn links you might not have considered.

#14: Determine a Keyword's Relative SEO Competitiveness

How hard would it be to rank for a particular keyword? Which keyword would be easier to rank for today? These questions are tough to answer unless you're willing to dig deep into data on the top results - and that's horribly time consuming (and a RPITB).

Solution: Keyword Difficulty Tool

The Keyword Difficulty tool provides a quick view into metrics that have historically helped SEOs determine potential competitiveness, as well as a percentage score that gives a sense of relative competition level.

Like Trifecta, the data isn't always perfect, and a new version of this tool is actually on its way (employing lots of the ranking models stuff we've been building with Linkscape to help actually analyze a page/site of your choice and tell you if you've "got a shot"). However, it's still quite a good tool for getting a robust dataset automatically and

#15: Getting On-Page Optimization Right

Have I targeted my keywords in all the right tags? Did I misplace or mis-code anything? Am I as "on-page optimized" as I can/should be? Sure, you can dig through the source code manually and check, but that's a (last time, I promise) RPITB.

Solution: Term Target

With the Term Target, just plug in the keyword you're targeting and the page you want to rank and it sends back an analysis of the keyword usage, along with recommendations for where and how to employ the query term.

There's nothing particularly complex here (though, eventually, we'll be switching to recommendations based on our correlation and ranking models data), but the usefulness is easy to see. We have members that I know just run the report on lists of pages, send the results to clients and get the changes implemented.

Next week, I'll look to cover many of the hairy SEO quandries that tools outside SEOmoz can help to solve. If you've got other ideas, tools or requests around any of these, please do leave them in the comments!

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Comments
112

Great rundown of the uses for various seoMOZ tools - if you carry on posting this stuff its going to get harder to compete against other would be SEO's!

What would be interesting to hear though (and I understand that this is ofcourse your site and your tools) would be a direct comparison between some of these functions and the ones offered by majesticSEO (which Im a bit of an addict of) and the ones provided by seoBook (which I dont use at all, as Im not a fan of the hard sell used over there).

Perhaps someone else could youmoz it, infact I might do so myself if its the kind of thing that would get published here (considering the slightly partisan nature of the comparing your tools to the competitors) but a balanced roundup I feel would be of use to the SEO community.

Bit of a correction here...what exactly is hard sell about our site that is not hard sell here? I mean this very blog post is a tutorial on why one needs to buy the tools, this site often uses a pop up, and has a scrolling sales letter with video, etc etc etc.

I just closed our site to new members for a few months because I was overwhelmed with all the work I do servicing clients. How is that remotely in line with the concept of hard sell?

We worked with the conversion rate experts folks (great guys, and the same one SEOMoz hired) and for a while we tested using a pop-up (like I believe SEOMoz still uses) and we eventually dropped the pop-up because...

our target market that converts bests tends to be more savvy and experienced marketers who are well seasoned in SEO, and the pop-up was a turn off to them

the types of customers who buy from hard sell were not really a good fit for our site, in part because we offer so much information and really emphasize the subjective nature of SEO in our forums...the people who like hard sell tend to like more of a black and white type approach (even if such reductionisms lead to giving advice that is often incorrect)

"Anything goes, dude. We're looking for the best-converting page, and if you think the best way to get conversions is with flying monkeys and marquee tags, then have at it! "

I think Rand has done a great job growing SEOMoz...but he was the one who said he wanted to gain something like 15,000 customers. I am happy with something around 500 to 1,000 or so (because I did not take VC capital and I also work on other websites). I don't need to be that hard sell to reach my goals...we have already surpassed them.

first off, if my comments in any way upset you I apologise, that was not my intention.

I am signed up as a non paying member over at your site, probably a year or so ago - and I have been a PRO member here at seoMoz since long before they started using the services of conversion rate experts, so if the same hard sell tactics currently go on to non pro members at seoMoz then I also wholeheartidly apologise for an unfair comparison.

The specific bit that I am referring to as "hard sell" that put me off was the wording of the daily emails received for about 10 days or so after signing up in the first place - that was actually a deal breaker for me as I was going to sign up as a pro member with seoBook.

Overly sales biased content in these emails makes me worry, perhaps even on a subconscious level that the actual content of the site might not be up to scratch, thats why the sales pitch is so damn good (because it has to be if you get my drift).

A bit of inverse logic there perhaps, but thats just the way I read it at the time. Lets face it, those daily emails are the footprint of a lot of poorer quality sites - NOT that Im asserting that yours is one of them.

Im sure that the loss of one customer is of little consequence to the overall marketing strategy for seobook - and when you reopen I might just take a subscription as well, it would be to take a gander at the forums and see how good the community is "behind closed doors" as its a model I think is far superior to this one at seoMoz (sorry Rand).

So: dont take my comments personally or to heart - it was purely my observation and I may not have been comparing like for like.

By the Way: I do have you on my blog reader and do digest most of what you write, as well as what goes on here at seoMoz, and if I ever bump into you at a conference I will say "hi"!

No worries...I just am a brand focused guy and realize that casual comments (when repeated often enough) can change percption of quality. So I wanted to make sure I did an A/B comparison that provided a bit of perspective.

I agree that our autoresponder does have some aggressive sales text in it...originally it was fairly weak, but it got made stronger and more aggressive while working on conversion. The info itself is not too hard sell...it is just the blurb at the end. I wonder if it might make sense to remove them from the emails.

That is the hard part with improving conversions - techniques that work well are often quickly adopted by scammers, so if you do what works well sometimes it lowers perception of quality and erodes trust. It really is walking a fine line to build demand and increase conversions...its every bit as tricky as SEO, and sometimes perhaps moreso.

I should be at Pubcon...think I am speaking 3 times, and once with Rand. If you see me do say hi.

Well, for my part I am happy chipping in that from what I have heard - the tools on seobook are great value and well respected in the industry - its just that I havent used them yet (heck I do most of my stuff the old fashioned way in excel and yahoo site explorer with various plugins I have self built).

Infact, at seoMoz london, Rand even mentioned that seobook tools are good as well!

Rand, great post here and I think it does an excellent job of highlighting the great tools SEOmoz has to offer. I will admit that I under use the tools but when I need them, they are there was do what I want.

One thing I wanted when I was a new member, and this post takes care of part of it, is a detail guide that explains how to fully take advantage of each tool. This would be helpful to new members and might spur some new Pro Member activity if they can see the full advantage of all these tools!

The labs toolset's really coming along Rand. There's a still a couple of things (I guess there'll always be a couple of things..) that I'd like to see. In fact, give Ben a gentle reminder from me, cos we talked about this at Pro:

1) Better form validation eg: removal of http:// in the intersect tool

2) Ability to sort by header response code in top pages. I want to see all the 404's in one place..

3) Export all 10,000 lines of data from top pages or / and a query string to add to the top pages url to display more results per page

4) Case sensitivity in the entered URL is an ongoing problem in all of these tools

Raven (which I'm guessing you'll be talking about next time) has a couple of nice tools, but they're not very well joined together. For example, the SERPs tracker has no Google analytics integration. So imagine this: you're watching a serp for your campaign terms, and you can click that keyword to see traffic over time. Awesome.

Anyways, nice work as always. Labs is still hugely leading the way tool wise :-)

Thanks for the feedback guys. I know we are a bit English-language centric right now. As we expand, the wider global market is certainly interesting, but we also want to be rock-solid here before we start that expansion. Still, look for more international functionality in the next big release - nearly 45% of SEOmoz PRO members are outside the US and we definitely want to be valuable to you!

Good advice - I can't promise anything (our current dev schedule backfills us until May), but we're trying to scale up engineering ability as fast as possible here to keep up with both feature requests and the long-term product direction. I hate to think that we're not providing the best experience possible, but I also know that we can't do it all and sometimes, tough choices have to be made. Thanks for keeping on top of us, though - good to have the pressure :-)

Just a quick comment, little off topic but in regards to the tools of SEOmoz...

As I am a huge fan of these tools and spend most of my day on the SEOmoz site, I do have one request that would be handy to me for the review and consideration of the SEOmoz team: the addition of advanced search operators.

Would really be fantastic, for example, to use the Juicy Link Finder with something like

I've been using this site for a couple of years now and had not noticed that the PageRank checker recorded historical data. Thank you - that's a great tip!

Out of interest where does it get the data from? Is it only when a report has previously been run? It would be great if as the index for Linkscape is built up it could check the PageRank at the same time giving both a more detailed record and a comparision with MozRank.

Nice post and IMO completely necessary to help ease your audience into many of the great resources SEOmoz provides. Even after being in the business for several years and watching SEOmoz grow from the beginning, it's at times overwhelming to fully take advantage of all SEOmoz has to offer. These tools are perfect for SEOs.

The only point I'd like to make is that it would be nice to extract some of this and simplify the user interface for less savvy clients. I know SEOmoz's target market may be different, but I must recommend other tools for some features for my less savvy clients. Otherwise I must spend tons of time walking them through SEOmoz and training them on how to take advantage of every little thing that they are curious about. Not because you don't do a great job, but rather because some people just rather ask somebody than read documentation. Don't change a thing because I NEED most of this stuff.

For my clients though, sometimes I will recommend tools that simply track rankings over time such as AuthorityLabs.com I don't have to field a ton of questions and my clients don't get distracted with all of the other cool stuff SEOmoz has to offer. I do introduce SEOmoz to my savvy clients or in-house SEOs, but most of them already know of SEOmoz.org is they are into SEO.

I agree that we over-complexify and don't organize or structure things well. Most PRO members, who pay for these services, don't always know where to go and how to use them! That's one of our biggest efforts for the release early next year.

Yeah - if you saw my Twitter stream, you knew I was feeling a bit guilty about a self-promotional post, but at the same time, it feels like a subject that can add a lot of value for SEOs (PRO or not) and a good handful of the features above are totally free for everyone.

Rand, the social media monitoring prototype looks promising.... I have just run it on a brand related 'British Council' terms and returns excellent data + the twitter counts are definitely giving it the edge. What I like about it is that it seems simple and straightforward, unlike Linkscape, which only after a few months using I got to around to using it efficiently exactly what I wanted. Good post altogether!

I think the tools that SEOMoz offers are great. I just wish that you could come up with some type of either pay as you go plan, or al-a-carte (sp?) plan. Although the new plans are good, some people don't use the tools often enough to make that investment worth the expense (I realize others could argue even one good thing that comes out of them, makes the expense worth it, but tell that to the finance guy!).

Subtext to all of these comments for me: its all about the interface and usability for those of us doing this everyday. It's time to integrate tools, save profiles, share data among tools, follow a logical workflow, and minimize all the clicking and cutting and pasting.

Some of these tools are great, but really: if the interface was great, would Rand's post even be necessary?

You mentioned it earlier in the comments taht you have 45% Users outside the U.S. , but I still have the question in my mind if your tools will work for SMB Companies in Germany with about no foreign engagement? Espcially if you have to work with keywords, that contain special german letters like ä, ö, ü or ß?

It really depends - some of the tools work fine, others not as well. We're trying to push towards consistency on this front, but as I explained up top, it's a big challenge. Certainly something that's important long term, though.

I just recently signed up and we have been so busy I just haven't had the time to research the value or use of each of the tools. This collection of what tools will accomplish certain tasks for us was much needed. It will allow me to compare the SEOmoz tools to the scattered mismatch of tools we are currently using. I'm sure we can save time if we only had the time to discover how, this post is a start. Thank you!

Rand, one more point. I really hate to enter the same URL and keywords in seomoz tools 20 times per week. Why doen't you create profiles for different webpages that can be saved? Right now there is a mess.

There is no full list of all your public (free & pro) tools and no way to save the data I work with almost every day. If I have 20 websites I do SEO for I would appreaciate to have a "history" for most of them. Am I the only one around?!

And please get rid of the horizontal scrolling. I get scrolling in almost every seo tool results page. Little scrolling, but it spoils the whole fun. Really. Sometimes the most ineteresting numbers you can not even see.

Great feedback - yes, we're certainly planning to make things much more integrated into a "campaign" in the next big iteration. We'll also look into the horizontal scrolling - that's not good usability at all. Thanks!

Yes, I agree with you, FatCow. It's kind-of annoying to have to re-enter all the information in these tools several times a day (and I'm only dealing with one company; I couldn't imagine having to deal with 20!).

I mentioned something like this before on a post re: the Link Intersect Tool Competitive Link Finder (which I love BTW). It would be nice to be able to store the data, i.e. save the data and be able to come back to it whenever you want to.

One thing I would really love to see is more comparison abilities. For example, if I've run two reports for the same site in Linkscape, I would love for there to be an easier way to compare them and highlight the changes since the last time the report was run.

Great point Kenneth and definitely something we're working towards. Ideally, we actually want you to be able to see history of a site's linkage even if you've never run a report previously. We store data from historic indices and are working hard on how to solve the sizing complexities when we roll out a historical data package.

I've been using seomoz tool for quite a while now, one of the best tool set I've ever used.

There is one thing need to be noticed, when using advanced search operators (e.g the search queries in general directories), it would be better to type them in rather than just click them through. It is risky to be considered as a ROBOT by google, I've been suspected and banned for few times, and the worst thing about it was it affected the entire office :S.

I just started reviewing seomoz tools and have a little problem with keyword difficulty tool - specifically top 10 sites in google, which are clearly different than in google serps and are missing some major websites for specific keywords.

Probably I'm missing something simple.

Besides that I find tools very good source of information on competition.

Awesome!!! Everyday new problems keep arising. Also, very well explained about arising SEO problems, but most challenging SEO practice that I face these days is local business listing in google. My business gets added there was traffic details but all of a sudden it stopped showing and no reason is given for this.

Couldn't thank you more for the explanations on the benefits of various tools here. I have been a PRO member here for about two years and have used various tools from here. But now I learnt many more useful information to deal my SEO services better using your tools.

http://www.seomoz.org/link-finder/ would need not only English words, I should have chance to add German words as well - "submit * site" OR "add * site" OR "add * link" OR "add * url" OR "submit * listing" site:www.superbrightleds.com is not enough. Would it be hard to make the tool multilingual?!

I need help. I hired an SEO firm and paid them a fortune to move me up the google rankings. They have written articles and published them in my name as the author. Some of these articles are talking about things that are very controversal and borderline "illegal" and have my name as the author when I did not write them. This is very damaging to my business. I need some advice on what I can do to get these removed and my reputation fixed online.

I have bookmarked this now to use as small guide for the SEOmoz tools. The thing is in the tools section there is not much tutorials or guides (specially the lab) so this is a good introduction. I am discovering new tools everyday. The lab is really great! :)

Rand; you mentioned self promotion in your Twitter posting I really don't mind it in this case - great way to show the real time uses of all your seo tools.

I think the Competitive Link Finder is ready to come out of the labs; however, the one thing I think would make it more useful and this is me just wanting more is to have maybe the top five DmR websites for each competitor generated some where; I am aware linkscape does this on a individual site basis but if we are going to be cheating with our link building efforts this additional data is welcomed.

This was a good post but I have a question on #3, I have seen several posts where your staff checks the mozrank passed by a link. This passed "link juice" is always a different number than the mR and DmR.

How are you calculating the mR passed for a paticular link? What does this mean to your mR and DmR?

Just like PageRank, the amount of "passed" mozRank is equal to the mozRank of the page, divided by the number of links on that page + a dampening factor. Ben/Nick can likely explain better, but that's at least the intuition. mR passed isn't my favorite metric, but it is highly useful for getting a sense of that "raw juice" that gets passed (which is more important for indexation kinds of issues than ranking ones, typically).

Really sorry to hear that! If you ever encounter issues with getting staff responses or something through sitesupport@seomoz.org, please don't hesitate to email me (rand@seomoz.org). We try to stay very on top of stuff and reply to everything within 72 hours.

Are you able to give any visibility on which tools you are concentrating on at the moment? Maybe I need to give them more time but when I last played with social media monitoring I didn't get that much from it.

Having said that, you have highlighted a couple of ways to use some of the other moz tools which I have overlooked so it's not like I'm complaining!

As Tom said though, posts like this are so useful to show to the fresh faced new SEOs while complaining like old men about trawling through Yahoo Site Explorer.

thanks for the gorgeous post. It kinda makes things easier when sitting in front of all those MozTools without having a clear action plan.

My main SEO-prob all along has been a tool to do keyword research in languages other than English. If you know of any great solutions for example for the German or French market, this would make my day!

the list is great and I know that the Pro Member Tools are great but as a small SEO or SEO beginner you might not purchase a pro membership. Which is why I think it is a pity that 9 of the tools are only available for pro members and 4 of the 6 free tools are very limited in thier use and results. http://www.seo-compilation.com/2009/11/03/15-seomoz-tools-tested-for-non-pro-members/

Especially the SEOmoz toolbar is a waste of space if you are not a pro member. For the few tools you can use as a regular member the toolbar is quite massive.

Your tools might definitely worth their money but I am always quite dissapointed when you test a "free" tool the second time and I get informed that this tool can only be used once in 24h.

Why don´t you create 2 member areas, where you separate free tools from pro tools? And it would be also good to know which tools can only be used once a day!

Hey Daniela - thanks for the post! You bring up a good point -we definitely use the "freemium" model here at SEOmoz with a goal to bringing folks to the PRO platform. As you can see from the above comments, we're swamped with requests and need engineering talent and funds to make this happen, so scaling the business with paying members gives us the ability to seriously improve the toolset, too.

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